Time Guard: The Awakening (21st Century)

by Anmol Batra

  Arjun briskly walks upstairs and waits at the top of the footbridge above the parked train. From a distance, he could see the railway scrapyard along the checkpoint.

  On the porch of the railway scrapyard, sits a young man with an Islamic beard, wearing a Takia. Arjun quickly rests his body against the railings and slides his soul out of his body.

  He quickly increases his subjective experience to a thousand times and flies closer to the man sitting in the front yard. The guard holds a water bottle tilted above his head with the water steady in mid-air. Arjun takes a 360-degree trip around the guard but can’t find any weapons with him.

  Next, he reduces his size to a centimetre and glides through the slit of his pocket.

  “A six-barrel loaded pistol,” he contemplates, looking into his pocket.

  Arjun returns to his body and observes the movement of the crowd.

  6th January 2013 7:50 AM | Baldia Chowk Park, Kasur, Pakistan.

  On Noor Masjid road, a Toyota Parada unbalances a horse cart while over taking it. One of the two women sitting in the cart wearing burkhas grips her handbag. Next, the duo turn their necks sideways trying to look at the lady who had just passed by so rashly.

  The SUV is driven by Swati, who is wearing a hijaab. Along with her sharp features, she manages to look like an urban Pakistani native.

  A few meters ahead and the bike overtakes her SUV. Swati takes a look at its number plate and accelerates quickly.

  The accelerating SUV knocks the bike at its back. The biker loses his balance and falls sideways.

  “Bang on!” She thinks and then quickly changes her expression.

  She steps down from the SUV and screams, “Hai Allah!” She rushes towards the biker.

  6th January 2013 7:55 AM | Kasur Railway Station, Pakistan.

  Jamal climbs upstairs wearing a green Kurta. He is carrying polyethene bags in one hand and a water bottle in the other.

  “As-Salaam-Alaikum Chacha!” Says a young man walking towards Jamal from the opposite direction.

  Jamal smiles and walks further towards him. “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam Shahid!”

  “How come you’re at the railway station on a Sunday?” Asks the young man.

  “I had some work,” replies Jamal and continues to walk, crossing him.

  Arjun waits for Jamal as he crosses behind his back.

  Jamal walks downstairs on the other side of the platform and further to Ankita’s outhouse.

  “Where is Salman?” Asks Jamal to the guard who is sitting in the front yard.

  “I don’t know,” replies the guard as he gets up from the chair. “He didn’t inform me about being late. He might be a few minutes away from here. Chacha, why don’t you wait for him?”

  He raises his hand towards Jamal, offering him a bunch of keys.

  “You know he is coming this morning,” says Jamal, while collecting the keys from him “And you know… He won’t like it if neither of you is on duty.”

  The guard takes a few steps out of the yard and jumps down on to the grass between the railway crossties. “Don’t worry Chacha!! There is no chance this girl is going to attempt an escape in broad daylight,” says the guard hastily, looking back at Jamal.

  Jamal spends a few seconds looking at the guard, who goes upstairs and over the bridge. He then moves closer to the door and turns the key to open the huge lock hanging on the door. He grips the latch and slides it open. To his surprise, a hand covers his face.

  Jamal wriggles in an attempt to get the guy holding him away. He loses the plastic bag in his hand. Next, Arjun cautiously pokes him with a knife, avoiding an incision, and pushes him inside.

  “ANKITA” He shouts, and looks around in the room.

  “How come you are here?” Asks Ankita, shocked to see her brother.

  “LATER! Get the rope out of my pocket,” he orders her.

  Arjun pushes Jamal from the back and forces him to kneel on the ground. The siblings tie up Jamal’s hands and gag him. The two leave Jamal lying on the ground with his face downwards.

  Ankita steps out of the door for the first time, after weeks of imprisonment. She takes a second to feel the sun and draws her breath to feel the fresh air. Meanwhile, Arjun locks the door from the outside and commands Ankita, “Run towards the footbridge.”

  6th January 2013 8:10 AM | Kasur Railway Station, Pakistan.

  The second guard reaches the scrap yard entrance. His attention is quickly drawn to the torn plastic bag and Paranthas wrapped in mud, scattered near the door. The smell of pickle further heightens his suspicion. Vigilantly, he pulls out his revolver and looks around for further clues. Next, he slides out his cell phone and dials Jamal’s number.

  On his phone, he could hear the bell ringing and subsequent cell phone ring coming from the locked door. Nobody picks up. He jumps down onto the railway tracks and swiftly looks both ways. From a distance, he sees a girl with an uncovered head, wearing a tatty salwar-kameez.

  “Oh shit!” He shouts and rushes towards the footbridge. On his way, he dials Omar’s number.

  “The girl has managed to escape!” He shouts on the phone while running towards the footbridge.

  “You fool! Find her quickly before the police do,” commands Omar in an irate tone.

  A train passes by the guard.

  “She is right in front of me, just a few minutes away, and she is accompanied by another man,” replies the guard while running towards the bridge.

  “Another man? Is he dressed like a cop?” Asks Omar.

  “No, he doesn’t seem to be a cop. In fact, he doesn’t seem to be from Kasur either. Should I shoot him?” Asks the Guard as he breathes heavily while briskly walking.

  “No don’t shoot at him. He could be undercover, with backup around him. Keep chasing them and keep me updated. We’ll reach Kasur in an hour,” replies Omar and disconnects the call.

  6th January 2013 9:30 AM Ferozepur Road, Pakistan.

  A vendor waves at a speeding SUV alongside a cart loaded with oranges. Swati, who is driving the SUV, looks at him but speeds straight past him.

  “I just can’t believe we rescued Ankita from Kasur without any obstacle,” says Swati, as she drives towards Lahore.

  Sitting in the rear middle seat, Arjun uncaps a bottle of Dettol and wipes the liquid over Ankita’s wounded forearm.

  Happy and relieved, Ankita scarcely even notices the burning sensation of antiseptic liquid and keeps looking at her younger brother. After weeks of waiting, she had given up hope of ever seeing Arjun and now he was in front of her. Questions explode like fireworks in her mind. She beams at Arjun and questions him in a low voice. “How did you manage to find me?”

  Arjun stops rubbing her wound and then glances at Swati’s eyes in the driver’s rear view mirror. He quickly looks back at Ankita and replies, “I’ll explain things to you in more detail once we reach India. We still have a few more hurdles, like your air travel.”

  Ankita smiles and leans over to hug her brother. Swati smiles, feeling gratified, looking at the siblings in her rear view mirror.

  “Correct me if I am wrong, aren’t you Swati…his Boss?” Asks Ankita, sitting with her back straight, facing the front.

  “Yes, I am…” replies Swati, looking back at Ankita. Suddenly, she sees something behind Ankita, in the traffic.

  “Is that a tank?!” She exclaims, looking in the rear view mirror.

  A second later, the SUV flies up in the air, flips forward and lands upside down on the ground, its front windshield cracking.

  Next, a green military jeep with an eight-foot cannon mounted on top of it parks along the overturned car. Two more SUVs park along the side of the road.

  Zaffar steps out of the military jeep and walks over to the SUV. He opens its door and pulls out the semi-conscious Arjun by his collar. “Have you brought my carton?”

  With his head bleeding terribly, Arjun blinks. His vision dimming, he makes out the face of Zaffar. Then, he closes his eyes and passes out.


  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 35

  The Crystal Asylum

  Unknown time | Cube 1

  Blinking Arjun wakes up lying on a glass floor, which is neither hot nor cold. He rubs his eyes and looks at the side wall, a transparent glass partially reflecting his image. He is dressed in purple like a soul, he observes.

  Arjun quickly gets up and rests his forehead against the glass. He covers his eyes from the sides, in an attempt to block out the light, and tries to look through the transparent glass.

  “Is this a glass chamber?” Contemplates Arjun, as he looks through it.

  With suspicion, he pulls his head back and looks to his front, a transparent glass plate with its surface partially mirroring his image.

  Worried, he looks sideways and finds another reflection of himself. He stands up quickly and spins 360 degrees, looking in all directions. He looks upwards and then searches on the floor, trying to find at least a grain of sand, but ends up finding nothing.

  Glass, glass, glass everywhere, no windows, no doors not even an air vent, Arjun observes. By now he had also realised that he wasn’t breathing, there was no heartbeat and this wasn’t a real world.

  Arjun sinks to the ground and starts to cry. He puts his hands on his face and sobs but without tears. In anguish and disbelief and in an attempt to reject the truth, he shouts “Swati!” As loudly as he can, but all he can hear is his own voice without an echo, as if the glass didn’t exist.

  Arjun sits on the glass floor. He spends a few moments looking around. Glass edges with slightly defused light glow across the three edges of the cube surrounding him, strong enough for Arjun to see his reflections but not enough to cause a blur.

  “Why the purple tinge?” He wonders

  Next, he starts thinking of Howrang’s words. ‘And yes, this means that the mind is inefficient at making a perfect crystal asylum’.

  “Inefficiency! What exactly did Howrang mean by that?” He thinks to himself while looking at glass walls and ceiling. “I should have asked Howrang there and then.”

  An hour passes by. Arjun starts patrolling the glass cube which has a ceiling just a few inches above his height. Next his attention goes back to the glowing edges of the cube again. A corner on the floor acts as a cross junction of the three glowing edges.

  Arjun looks at the glass surface again and carefully observes one of the glowing edges on the floor. The light is strongest at the cross junction but reduces in strength across the open ends.

  “Why just three edges?” He observes and then hypothesises, “There should be a light source in that direction?”

  “One of the cubes headquarters the hourglass that is also used by soul reapers as an entry or an exit to the prison, if required.” Arjun recalls Diachi’s words.

  “There has to be something at the source but how can I get there?” Contemplates Arjun, and starts patrolling the cube again. “I think there should be a slit in the edges.” Next, he goes closer to the non-glowing side of the edges, trying to observe a slit. He crawls on his knees and elbows hoping to see a gap and after going around all the edges on the floor, ceiling and along the walls, he concludes that there is nothing but perfection in the cube.

  Arjun walks to the middle of the room and contemplates where else it could be. He stretches both his arms up. Arjun’s right hand knocks the glass but the other hand swings up and hits an open edge. With surprise, Arjun looks straight above his head and finds his reflection far above, as if the ceiling is a few meters above his head.

  He observes a shapeless gap without any sharp edges in the ceiling. He holds the glass edge in his hands and finds it to be of practically no thickness. Yet, the glass seems unbreakable to him.

  Surprised but happy, he flies into the chamber above him.

  3 Hours in Crystal Cube | Cube 2

  Another chamber, with three edges similarly glowing and a strong glow in one corner. From his experience, he first observes the roof this time.

  “Hmm… no gap in the ceiling now,” he concludes.

  Next, he starts inspecting the walls of the glass cube and finds another shapeless gap in one of the walls, but this gap takes him away from the light source.

  Arjun observes this but ignores it “I should keep moving,” he decides and flies into the new glass chamber.

  2nd Day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 442

  Arjun enters the 442nd cube, the gaps had taken him far away from the light source and the glowing edges of the cube seemed dimmer than the first cube he had found himself in.

  Mentally exhausted, he sits down on the floor.

  “Those drug smugglers will have sold Ankita and Swati to that Arab by now,” he thinks. Arjun doesn’t have a clear idea but to him it seems like it has been two days since he found himself in the crystal asylum. While the initial movement across the chambers gave him happiness, it now seemed impossible.

  Arjun stands in the glass room and thinks, “Wait! If I am awake as a soul in my mind, I must possess more capabilities as well.”

  The thought acting as motivation, he reduces his size to a hundredth of itself and flies to the middle of the cube. He quickly looks around, flying in all directions, swiftly evaluating the surfaces for gaps.

  3rd day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 1589

  His reduced size is helping him move into cubes swiftly, but even after another twenty-four hours of struggle, Arjun finds himself stuck in a cube with a dimmer light than cube one.

  After patrolling the 1589th Cube, Arjun finds another gap in it, a breach on the opposite surface to the glowing corner. A thought grabs his mind. “Is this the only opening after the one I came from?” Arjun recalls that he never bothered to look for another opening after he found the first one, besides his entry gap.

  “I should be selective about my movement; there is no point drifting across this prison if I am moving away from the light source,” contemplates Arjun.

  After careful observation he chooses another discipline for himself. He will only move into another cube if the gap is on a surface with a glowing edge, otherwise he will go back to the previous room looking for another gap.

  4th Day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 1700

  Arjun is spending more time in each cube now. He is now moving closer to the light source but tracing through a lesser number of cubes. On his way, he had found cubes with five or six gaps, but the choice was now easy.

  And for the first time, he was in a cube which was somewhat different.

  The centre of the purple glow in this one had now shifted from a corner to a complete edge along the surface of the floor.

  Arjun spends a minute understanding what this could possibly mean. “I need to further restrict my choices now.” Thinks Arjun. “Instead of three surfaces, I need to look for a gap in two surfaces sharing a common glowing edge.”

  5th Day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 2153

  Arjun finally lands in a cube with a fully glowing surface. He smiles, looking at the glow as it blinds him. With half-closed eyes he spends three hours looking for gap in the glowing surface but fails to do so.

  “There has to be a gap in it!” Arjun presses himself while looking at the glass.

  But after spending twelve hours on a single surface, Arjun feels demotivated. The movement through the cubes gave him a motivation, the increase in light glow from the corner gave him motivation. With every cube, he felt progress happening but now it seemed all over to him because there was an impeccable glass surface crafted by his mind, which was just perfect.

  Frustrated, he bangs his shoulder on the glowing glass surface, but it doesn’t crack or move.

  5th day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 2153

  Arjun spends hours in the same room. Recalling his past, his moments of happiness and sadness deep inside him, he has now given up. “Ankita and Swati have been sold off,” he tells himself.

  “What, does that mean that the two shouldn’t be rescued then?” His inner self shouts at him from within.

  “I can’t!”
Cries Arjun.

  ‘Square roots,’ Arjun recalls the time he spent sitting before his father at a study table, trying to solve a particular set of mathematical questions, giving up every time he failed to find the right one. He recalls how his father always remained calm when he returned a wrong answer even after multiple attempts. Rather, he even managed to calm down the disheartened Arjun and convince him to pick up the pen again.

  “Problems don’t defeat us, Arjun.” He recalls his father’s words, “It’s we who always do it to ourselves. We lose against problems because we choose to. Because there is nothing left as motivation. But this is when the real fight begins. When you train your mind to stop feeding on external motivation, respect and reward. When you learn to ignore pain and disbelieve. When you absorb criticism as a path to improvement instead of fighting it with your ego. That’s when your wisdom will find a path towards your destiny.”

  With this, Arjun stands up and starts looking around again. He explores the adjoining surfaces to the glowing surface and finds a tiny gap in one of the surfaces, other than his entry point. Hesitantly, he decides to enter and continue with the journey ahead.

  10th Day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 8323

  Another cube with a fully glowing surface; this time it was the roof. For the fourth time, Arjun had come across a room with a fully glowing surface and for the first time, he manages to find a slit in the surface. Arjun quickly shrinks and slides through it.

  Another room with even a brighter glow, but sadly Arjun fails to find a gap in it. Sad but strong of will, Arjun continues his journey through a wall with a nick.

  14th Day in Crystal Asylum | Cube 16217

  Days pass by. Arjun had managed to pass through shiny glass walls on several instances now, but he just couldn’t manage to reach the light source. Tired, he reaches another room with a glowing glass floor. He spent more hours evaluating the gap on glowing surfaces than the non-glowing ones, and this was another cube with an impeccable glass surface.